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PREBIOTIC SOUP. "The analogy with biological organisms is highly tenuous—as Edge readers will be flooding your inbox to point out. It's just the beginnings of something, in a faintly metazoan sense. The operating system used to be the system that operated a computer. Now it is becoming something else." https://lnkd.in/dVwXzv5 View in LinkedIn

LARGE AND BLURRING BORDERLINE. "The fact that all the dominant modern theories consider that life progressively emerged from some kind of proto-organisms, strongly grounds the hypothesis of the existence of a large and blurring borderline between living and non-living, were the inert progressively fades into the living." https://lnkd.in/dEj5vVD View in LinkedIn

MULTI-CELLULAR ORGANIZATION ON THE NET. "Dyson argued that "turning this into a political issue-Government versus Microsoft-is diverting attention from something much more significant: the growth of multi-cellular forms of organization on the Net." https://lnkd.in/dVwXzv5 View in LinkedIn

EXPANDING UNIVERSE. "We're missing a tremendous opportunity. We're asleep at the switch because it's not a metaphor. In 1945 we actually did create a new universe. This is a universe of numbers with a life of their own, that we only see in terms of what those numbers can do for us...there really is a universe of self-reproducing digital code. When I last checked, it was growing by five trillion bits per second. And that's not just a metaphor for something else. It actually is. It's a physical reality." https://lnkd.in/dVwXzv5 View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL UNIVERSE. "What we're missing now, on another level, is not just biology, but cosmology. People treat the digital universe as some sort of metaphor, just a cute word for all these products. The universe of Apple, the universe of Google, the universe of Facebook, that these collectively constitute the digital universe, and we can only see it in human terms and what does this do for us?" https://lnkd.in/dVwXzv5 View in LinkedIn

THE GREAT PROFESSOR FRED HOYLE. “A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.” https://lnkd.in/d5RUEK2 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE this weekend features some articles that discuss the freaky improbability of evolution. It is simply one of biology’s burrs under the skin. A very big one. Skeptics have had a field day on the topic, but the irksome fact remains that we can observe evolution on our timescales today both in microorganisms like yeast and bacteria and also in creatures like birds. It may be a burr, but its existence is irrefutable. View in LinkedIn

HORIZONTAL GENE TRANSFER. "The origin of bacterial genes in eukaryotes. In addition to gene duplication, horizontal gene transfer events have played a major role in the emergence of the eukaryotic cell, as is evident by the significant amount of genes that clearly are of bacterial origin that reside on eukaryotic genomes." https://lnkd.in/ewbMda5 View in LinkedIn

"MUTATION is a natural process that changes a DNA sequence. And it is more common than you may think. As a cell copies its DNA before dividing, a "typo" occurs every 100,000 or so nucleotides. That's about 120,000 typos each time one of our cells divides." Add to the horizontal gene transfer and you have a sloshing bucket of genes. https://lnkd.in/d9VF6RH View in LinkedIn

THE CONCEPT OF SPECIATION, a central part of evolution troubled by an unsolved definition, is in fact solved by thinking of variants or strains instead of species, instead of the idea of an immutable species with a clear species barrier. View in LinkedIn